By Greg O’Brien
I REMEMBER WHEN THEN-CRTC broadcasting vice-chair Andrée Wylie told the 1999 CCTA convention in Vancouver that the Commission had no intention of trying to regulate the Internet.
Because of it’s very nature, it’s impossible to regulate the Internet itself (unless you’re China or some other repressive government that deploys some painful cyber-clamps and doesn’t mind tossing people in jail for reading the New York Times or somesuch online), which the CRTC recognized early on. Plus, 1999 was pre tech-bubble and the opportunities of the ‘net seemed endless. Why toss up regulations in front of such potential?
That Commission non-decision has proved a boon to media, cable and telecommunications firms – not to mention millions of other Canadians who are free to create and share their own media and deliver it over this ever-widening backbone. Service after service, application after application, have been delivered to, and by, eager consumers via the web. Video, audio, podcasts, downloads, ringtones, photos, music.
Setting the copyright battle and the theft of intellectual property aside, the exponential expansion of the world wide web has caused nothing but growth.
Rogers Cable reported $440.7 million in revenue in 2005 from high speed Internet subscribers for example. In 1999, it was a fraction of that as the company had just 131,000 Internet customers. Today it has well over a million.
Shaw, Bell, Telus, Cogeco – all have similar stories to tell. Broadband has led to billions of dollars in growth.
Enabling that growth meant spending, collectively among cable and telecom firms, well over $10 billion in Canada over the past decade to push high speed Internet farther and farther afield so that consumers can pretty much do as they please over their own information highway off-ramp.
The information highway cliché may sound trite these days due to pure overuse in the early phases of the Internet, but it’s still a very apt metaphor.
I like to think of the data packets traveling across the web as cars. Each little vehicle merrily speeding on its way to be displayed or to be heard somewhere in the world. Those packets travel mostly on super speedways built by cable- and telcos. Now, there’s so much traffic these days – and some vehicles like shared video files and applications such as Bit Torrent are like giant “WIDE LOADS” that they take up vast swaths of roadway – the travel of all cars can bog down.
In order to manage that then, should there be a new toll placed on the road for those who use so much of the road – or use it much more often? Should some traffic be managed differently? Answers are beginning to come already.
This is the discussion of net neutrality, which asks: Since the major telecom and cable firms are already reaping billions in fees from the end consumer paying anywhere from $15 to $100 a month for Internet access, should they be allowed to charge, say, Google, or Yahoo! or iTunes, or a radio station or even cartt.ca a fee for using their pipe to send their content? If so, these fees will be passed on to the consumer, who may then be paying their ISP in a number of new ways.
There’s a bit of this developing out west. Shaw Communications is offering customers of Vonage or other third-party voice over IP providers a $10 a month fee that is supposed to ensure quality of service for those Shaw High Speed customers who choose to get their voice service from someone else, using Shaw’s road.
Vonage says it’s a cash-grab with the sole purpose of deterring anyone wanting to take Vonage’s phone service and has complained to the Commission to take action.
Other consumers have complained long and hard on message boards about the network management practices of Rogers, Shaw, Bell and others, saying their ability to use functions like BitTorrent to access and share media files has been impaired by the ISP’s supposed packet-preference practices.
But, with each of these companies now providing lifeline voice over IP, shouldn’t the network be managed so that a phone call (because who knows if it’s an emergency call) gets preference over a quicker download of Paris Hilton’s latest sexcapades?
It looks like communications commissions on both sides of our border will have to step in at some point. Should the road’s builders be able to institute more tolls? If so, those costs will go straight to the consumer, of course, and what will that do to growth? Should ISPs be able to prefer some cars over others? Should voice packets get to use the carpool lane while enormous video-laden trucks be forced to wait, or trundle along on the shoulder of the road? Should an additional fee be paid by those using hotmail accounts?
All questions which are currently being asked.
Seems to me that to answer these questions and myriad others, some form of Internet regulation – if not on the ‘net itself, but the companies who are the gatekeepers – is inevitable.
